"God was fair to the Japanese," said the late Diana Vreeland, in her now famous interview with biographer George Plimpton. "He gave them no oil, no diamonds. He gave them style."

San Francisco's newly opened Muji store, along with the recently opened Uniqlo, are certainly testaments to the Japanese design aesthetic that emphasizes simplicity and pure functionality.

Muji is home to the cultish brand of home and lifestyle goods that are so exquisitely simple in their design - as well as modestly priced - that it is often impossible to exit the store without something in hand. Until now, the only U.S. stores were in New York (the first opened in SoHo in 2007) along with an outpost at JFK International Airport. A second West Coast store is planned for March in San Jose.

"I actually made a point to fly out of JFK just so I could shop there," says San Francisco resident Tiffany Bukowski, 26, who favors the brand's beauty and kitchen accessories. "Everything is just so unique, and you give people a gift from there and it seems very exotic to them."

In Japanese, muji essentially translates as "no brand," and it is this stripped-down philosophy that informs the company's design aesthetic, with an array of products that are bereft of unnecessary ornamentation - they don't go for baroque. This ideology continues down to the plain brown packaging. Fans love Muji precisely for this reason.

The company chose San Francisco for its first foray into the West because of the city's unique ties to the Pacific Rim and its diverse, upscale community of design lovers who appreciate functionality.

The new store in the city's SoMa district offers more than 2,000 items on nearly 8,000 square feet. Virtually every aspect of the brand's products and retail design is decidedly Japanese: a store for modernists of every stripe where form and function are presented not as exceptions but as ultimatums.

"Simplicity, modesty, rationality, appropriateness and a little restraint" is how Hiroyoshi Azami, president of Muji USA, describes the brand's design principles. "Our product development team constantly exercises self-restraint in the design and manufacture of its products, asking, 'Is this necessary?' or 'Is this going too far?' " Within the design world, many of Muji's designers are revered, but they remain largely anonymous to the general public.

The result, however, is some of the brand's most iconic pieces, including a wall-mounted CD player ($99.50) that routinely sells out at New York's Museum of Modern Art gift shop. Or the Markable Umbrella, which comes in five colors and features a hole in the handle for name tag, ribbon, or charm so that it is unmistakably yours ($15.95).

Travelers flock to Muji for its array of voyage-related items, like the sleek, Hard-Cover suitcase that comes with a TSA lock ($245). Or maybe just the T-Shirt Cube, which is shrink-wrapped into a small square that fits in your hand ($15).

Exclusive to the San Francisco store is the brand's Real Furniture collection, which includes a wide array of modular wooden bookcases that can be fitted with matching drawer units, a leather loveseat, and a lean but sturdy oak dining table that would be the envy of the Danes or Swedes (about $650). A polyurethane sofa ($265) is so sinuous and curvaceous it might be mistaken for a Roche-Bobois, and because it doesn't have arms, it can expand as necessary simply with the addition of more units.

Beauty products in clear or amber bottles are lined up on shelves with military precision, along with packages of tiny kits for any number of tiny tasks. It's not uncommon to see shoppers marveling at a toilet brush or bamboo rice spoon with newfound respect.

Design visionary and wunderkind Bruce Mau describes Muji as a place that "inspires optimism," one that plants a cultural stake in the ground of mainstream consumerism. Muji, he says, is "not an antibrand but a non-brand, an open space in the public imagination, a place where I can live my life as I imagine it."